An Asian language document contains Asian characters, each of which is generally of a square block shape. Some Asian documents are confidential in nature, and thus it is desirable to provide a method and system for encoding or encrypting such documents.
In some situations, it is further desired that each individual character included in the Asian document, even after the document as a whole is encoded, is still recognizable or identifiable. For example, when a confidential Asian document is scanned into a computer, not all the characters included in the document may be correctly recognized due to limitations in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Thus, a human operator may need to read the scanned-in and OCR-processed document to see if there is any wrongly-recognized (e.g., incomplete) character and, if so, manually replace it with a correct character by typing in the correct character.
The present invention is directed to addressing the need for encoding an Asian document, while maintaining each of the individual characters included in the document recognizable even after the document as a whole is encoded to thereby become unreadable.